


The Weight of Living

by GalacticHawks



Category: Nancy Drew (Video Games)
Genre: Game 32: Sea of Darkness, Gen, Light Angst, Other Characters Are Mentioned, and secrets can kill, kind of, ransom of the seven ships, there is a lot of talk of death, vague spoilers for it and:, white wolf of icicle creek lodge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-10-09 23:53:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17414957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalacticHawks/pseuds/GalacticHawks
Summary: “I’m finding that these days, I’m surprisingly hard to kill,” she told Gunnar, and laughed.Nancy has died many times, and keeps going.





	The Weight of Living

**Author's Note:**

> The basic premise of this is: what if whenever Nancy died in game, she died "for real" and was revived, the same way second chances work. It takes place during Sea of Darkness, but early on, so no major spoilers other than the basic plot, and the same goes for the other games listed, with the exception of Ransom. Let me know what you think!

_“I’m finding that these days, I’m surprisingly hard to kill,”_ she told Gunnar, and laughed. _We’ll see about that, detective,_ he scoffed, and she nearly laughed again. 

Standing there in the Missti Skip, barely an hour after arriving in town, it was easy for her to laugh at death, at the implication that it would find her here in a small village in Iceland.

It was easy for her to ignore that she had died many times before this, and would die many more. 

How would it find her here? she wondered. Would it find her in the cold snow, lost out beyond town with a broken snowmobile? The icy depths of the ocean? Or worse, would it find her at the hands of another, desperate to keep the treasure hidden?

_I hate the water,_ Gunnar said, and the ache of drowning filled her chest. _Hate the smell of it, the sound of it. Won’t ever return._ It pulled her back to Dread Isle, where she had died again and again in the ocean, desperate to unlock the chest and save Bess. The fear had shaken her hands, slowed her mind, and she had suffocated over and over. But with death came a kind of clarity, and each attempt left her closer to success, until she had swam down, hands steady and mind sharp, the solution at her fingertips. 

She had tried hard, that case. And why wouldn’t she have? Bess was one of her closest friends, and no one else was there to help. So she suffered the rocks hitting her as she climbed the mountain, the ache left in her bones each time she awoke after falling. She suffered the cave collapse as she turned the hourglasses, counting down the seconds between each one as carefully as possible, only to be too slow or too fast. 

But in the end, she saved Bess, even if it left her ragged and exhausted, sore from dying and reviving time and time again. There was a part of her--small as it was--that questioned why she continued to do this. Why she continued to travel from place to place, jump from mystery to mystery, when it only brought death after death. 

_Tell me what you think happened to Magnus,_ she asked, leaning against the bar. It would be what the others said: he had drowned, and if not that, then the cold had took him, just as it had with her time and time again at Icicle Creek. 

And maybe that was why she persisted. She knew, now, what death felt like, and if she could prevent it from happening to another, then wasn’t it her duty? She knew, too, what the sting of false accusations felt like, and if Magnus was still alive, and _hadn’t_ stolen the treasure, then wasn’t it also her duty to clear his name? 

But more than that it was the thrill that kept her going. It would be a lie to say that solving mysteries wasn’t thrilling, that pushing past each puzzle and obstacle wasn’t her favorite thing in the world. She knew the Hardys’ felt it, that they were the same as her: determined and clever, sly and unassuming. And it was worth it, even if she couldn’t look at a bath without feeling a shiver of fear since the ryokan, half expecting a ghost to fall from the ceiling and force her under the water. In the end, it may have been fake, but it haunted her still. 

The first time death had struck her, she hadn’t known what had happened. There was a gas leak, and she hadn’t known what to do, hadn’t known how to stop it, and by the time the sense to run had struck her it was too late. 

And then she awoke, and it had began again. 

It wasn’t until it the next time it happened that she realized it wasn’t a dream, that this was all horrifyingly real. That she had died, and death had rejected her, unsatisfied with a job unfinished. 

When she thought about it, it was disconcerting that she could tell you in exact detail how it felt to die from an explosion, how the heat burned away everything, how the blast tore you apart. How she could describe how it felt to suffocate, to drown, to freeze, to fall so far your bones shattered. 

How it felt to wake up, to do it all again, to push past the pain and fear. 

It was making her reckless, she thought. Not so reckless it compromised her work, but it was making her less careful, less exact. She approached things with less caution--climbing, swimming, exploring. What if her luck ran out, one day? 

She didn’t know how she would eventually die for the last time. If it would be when she was old and grey, if it would be in America or maybe here in Iceland. If one day she would take a risk, and whoever watched over her decided they’d had enough and let her slip away into the afterlife. 

And maybe that was why she should stop. Why she should say “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you,” and turn back to River Heights. Why she should listen to everyone for once and agree that it was too dangerous, that she should slow down and go home. Because, if she died, then she would be leaving everyone. Her father wouldn’t have just lost his wife, he’d have lost his daughter as well, and all he’d have was Hannah and Togo. She’d be leaving the Hardys’ and Ned, Bess and George. All her friends and contacts around the world. Everyone. 

_But,_ she thought, half listening to Gunnar, _but,_ she had made it this far. She had made it this far, and every step of the way she had helped people. And if she could take whatever power it was she had and use it to defy the obstacles placed in her path--if she could do all that and help people? Then it would be worth it. 

Abandoning all that, she felt, would be worse than death.


End file.
